Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Even backstage, she made noise: she sang under her breath so people would know she was coming. Years later, when I heard about the way bats navigate, I thought of Penny, singing out as she groped her way through life. She fixed on her face a standoffish expression because she didn’t want to smile at strangers, and you could get quite close to her before she could make out your features, and this was her charm. The minute you came into focus, Penny would suddenly look delighted, relieved, nearly heartsick. Just the person I was longing to see! She’d grab you by the forearm. She wouldn’t let go.

You had to love Penny for that, and Rocky did. He never noticed that she did it to everyone she knew.

“She’s adorable,” he told me.

“She is,” I answered, and I thought, Right up until she opens her mouth. I found her — forgive me, Penny, I didn’t know you well then — maddening. Completely. She couldn’t shut up. Spending time with Penny was like walking into a crowd of chickens: that noisy and that meaningful. Or like she’d been having a conversation with herself all day, and there was no way you’d catch up. Rocky, no mean talker himself, watched her babble, happily shaking his head. He started keeping company with her. At least I think he did. It was hard to tell. Maybe I was keeping company with her. All I knew was that for a week at the Casino, followed by a week at Loew’s Majestic in the Bronx, then finally in Manhattan at the Eltinge (named after the famous female impersonator), she was around all the time, at dinners, in taverns. She’d reach out and snag one of our forearms and say, brightly, “Where will we dine tonight, boys?” I’m still not convinced that Penny wasn’t just desperate for a couple of seeing-eye friends. It must have been a great relief to her not to totter into a burlesque house thinking it was a department store.

For instance: at a midtown chop house, Rocky was telling a story about Julian Eltinge, the theater’s namesake: he’d once punched Rocky in the nose.

“Why?” I asked.

“He thought I made a comment about his virility.”

“Did you?”

Rocky looked theatrically sheepish. “No. No words were exchanged at all.”

“So why did he hit you?”

“I patted him on the keester. I thought it was a compliment, from one professional to another.”

“What a beautiful dress,” Penny said.

We had manners, we were game: we looked around to see what dress Penny meant.

“The one I saw Eltinge in,” she said. “He was fat already, but, my God! I wish I looked that good.” Then she said to Rocky, “I mean, you’ve never patted my keester.”

“I’m a gentleman,” Rock explained. “That was my problem: so was Eltinge.”

“I could use a nice dress.” Penny sighed. “I like blue.” Then, moments later, “I like cut flowers in a vase.” She sensed movement in the room, and called out to the man who was approaching our table, “I could use a fresh napkin.”

The guy in question was a tall blond young man in a tan suit with oversized shoulder pads and a dizzying checked yellow tie. The waiters, on the other hand, were all puny Jewish fellows in short red jackets and black bow-ties. “Couldn’t we all?” the guy said amiably, and kept on going toward the Gents’.

“Was that the maître d’?” Penny asked.

I laughed. “For Pete’s sake, Penny, why don’t you get glasses?” Maybe I was just a glasses snob, having gotten my first pair at age twenty-five. I admired myself in the mirror constantly, though I don’t know whether that was because they suited me or because I hadn’t clearly seen my own face for several years. Or because I had also just purchased my first toupee, and I was working on not noticing it.

“I don’t need them,” Penny said. Then, to Rocky, as if I’d suggested she should wear a mask to cover her puss, she said, “Mike thinks I should get glasses!”

He said, “Not till we’re married, sweetheart,” and slapped me heartily on the back.

That was a joke, I was sure. He thought she was pretty sweet — it was all he could do to resist picking her up and carrying her around so she wouldn’t bump into things — but he wasn’t even sleeping with her. I thought he should give it a try. Penny was so eccentric, not to mention free with her fingers, that it would at least have been an interesting experience.

Niagara Falls the First Time

Penny saw us off at Penn Station — we were headed for Buffalo, then Canada, the first time I’d ever leave the States. She stood on the platform and waved at all the passing windows, just in case someone she knew was on the other side, waving back.

“Nice girl,” I said to Rocky, hoping for some information. He shrugged, and shouldered his suitcase onto the luggage rack.

“Very nice girl,” I said again.

He nodded absentmindedly. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I want to stop and see Niagara Falls. We’ll go?”

“I guess.”

“You guess ?”

“Water running downhill,” I said. If he was bored by Penny, I was bored by some dog-legged river. “What’s the big to-do?”

“You’ll see. Don’t play jaded, kid. It doesn’t become you.”

He was right. Good God: I’d only known the Falls as part of that old bit. In real life the river poured and poured and poured, rainbows woven in at the bottom, the giant plume of mist floating up, water giving into gravity and then finding a loophole. I could see how the mere memory could drive someone insane. I felt unstable myself.

“Rocky,” I said in wonder. “Why don’t they take a breath ?”

“They don’t have waterfalls in Iowa?” he asked casually.

I didn’t know the answer to that. Anyhow, it sure wasn’t Duluth.

There was a guy there who engraved drinking glasses with names. He used a pneumatic drill tipped with a diamond, and the glass chips rained down, beautiful as the diamond, beautiful as the finished glass, beautiful as the Falls themselves. I thought about getting one, but didn’t know whose name to put down. In my father’s house, there were seven ruby glass cups, souvenirs of some fair from some cousin, one for each of us living kids, our names and birth dates written on the side. By now my sisters had plenty of children whose names might be engraved in glass by a fond uncle; Annie, my dogged correspondent, had cataloged them for me. I fingered a bill in my pocket.

“C’mon,” said Rocky. “Let’s go.”

Souvenirs everywhere, mostly for the fabled visiting newlyweds and their spendthrift sentiment. I examined reverse-glass painted brooches, change purses made of tiny seashells, etched aluminum cups. We stood on the Canadian side of the border and Rocky read aloud from a pamphlet about all the people who’d ever gone over the Falls in a barrel. Not all of the barrels were barrels: one guy rode over in a giant rubber ball, another in a tin ship that crumpled like foil on the river below.

“Here’s someone,” said Rocky. “‘His capsule bounced behind the great curtain of the Falls, out of the reach of rescuers. Despite all efforts to save him, Stathakis suffocated behind the rush of water.’ ”

“Well, then he lived longer than he deserved to.”

“You wouldn’t go over?” Rocky asked. “You’d be a hero if you lived.”

I turned to him. The wind had pulled his hair into chunks. He looked at the Falls as though they were a particularly worthy adversary, and I decided not to tell him that in June of 1927 I’d lost my stomach for acts of pointless, gravity-tempting bravery. That man who starved had had a family, and they’d never forgiven him for what he’d done.

“We’re booked for weeks,” I said. “Please don’t go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”